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Book Review: Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian

I feel like it’s the end of an era, because I finally finished the Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer. I reviewed the penultimate novel, The Atlantis Complex, last year, and I’m pleased to say that the finale was much better.

If you haven’t heard of Artemis Fowl, let me bring you up to speed. Artemis is a boy genius with unsurpassed intellect, upscale taste in designer suits and classical music, and an obsession with increasing his already massive family fortune. His penchant for illicit scheming makes him many enemies, but he’s always shadowed by his best friend/bodyguard Butler.

The book series covers his life from ages 12-15, starting when he kidnaps an elf military officer named Holly Short to gain access to fairy gold to the present novel in which he puts aside his greed to save humanity. After seven books, Artemis and Holly are close comrades, and together with centaur techie Foaly and conniving dwarf Mulch Diggums, they must once again band together to stop the series’ pixie villain Opal Koboi.

It’s interesting to see an author’s writing style evolve over the course of a saga, and at times I felt Colfer inserted too much politics in regards to climate change or animal species preservation. The Atlantis Complex did not feel true to the series when Artemis became an obnoxious schizophrenic. Reading that novel, I was worried that Colfer had lost his magic.

But it came back full force in The Last Guardian. As Opal used time travel to thwart the LEP, I too felt like my younger self, literally laughing out loud at the many jokes that made the series so fun when I was in middle school. Being entertained by Mulch’s flatulence might seem juvenile, but with Artemis and friends battling an army of possessed crickets and ducks, how could you not chuckle?

Harry Potter fans will most likely draw similarities between the two supernatural stories, especially at the end of The Last Guardian. Artemis must make a sacrifice like Harry, but I won’t give away the details. I’ll just say that you walk away with that sad, yet satisfied feeling of fulfillment.

I only wish there could have been more romance between Artemis and Holly! Is that weird? I know that love blossoming between a teenage human boy and a three-foot-tall, 80-year-old elf would be far-fetched, but readers of the series know just how close they’ve become over the years. And in my opinion, nothing Artemis does can be considered normal or average, so I wouldn’t expect his love life to be either.

Lack of love story aside, reading Artemis Fowl has been a wonderful ride, and I would recommend the tale to anybody. Don’t wait until the movie comes out, because after eight years of conflicts, ranging from financial disputes between Disney and the Weinstein Company to the creative decision between CGI and live-action, the project has been shelved as of last year. The odds of seeing Artemis on-screen soon are slim, but at least you have time to catch up reading!